(Background: first real coding job, doing perl stuff for a
dot com; no prior practical experience jumping into someone
else's large pile of code, and its been intimidating as hell
for a while. I've been here a month now and until this last
week I haven't even really been hacking on the Big Project I
was ostensibly hired to help with. Weird politics, etc;
spent the last several weeks getting to know the various
systems (pile of Linux boxes with a couple NT machines
running the Tango drek that our site still relies on (to top
which off, Tango is being sold by Pervasive, the company
responsible for it, which means we're just that much more fucked)) and coding
up a couple varyingly convoluted newsfeed parser/poster perl
scripts to stock our database with a less-reliable version
of information that folks who care will go to the original
site for anyway. So, daunting or not, it's rather a relief
to be diving into this big old project.)

So I've been squashing bugs this week. In the process, I
seem to have cracked through the ethereal layer of grok that
was erstwhile making me feel like I didn't know anything
about Perl or programming or logic. Big relief.

So now, if things are as the seem, our users will (a)
actually get visual notification if their messages' mail
headers claim them to be, respectively, "Highest" priority.
Does anyone use this? At all? I grew up on the Net
relatively ignorant to header contents (just learned the
nitty-gritty on USENET headers last week on a whim;
x-no-archive makes a lot of sense), so maybe I just never
thought about it, but I don't think I've ever gotten a
"priority" mail in my life.

Also, when a user deletes a folder, they will no longer have
all of their mail in their main inbox deleted from the
server.

That last issue is, as far as I understand it, *still* an
issue in the original product on which we're hacking. Need
to check this out, let them know.

I suppose that when/if this product ever gets around to not
sucking, I might post the URL or something. But dammit,
it's utterly commercial and blah, so maybe not. Kinda hard
to be too proud of something that you manage to convert from
bloated, inconsistently written pile of crap that doesn't
work to s/n't//.

Commute:

Hell on earth. I go from Worcester (MA) to
Providence (RI) and back, 3 days a week (telecommuting teus
and thurs to save my sanity). Shouldn't be a problem, it's
only a 45 minute drive, an hour with traffice, right?

But, well, I don't have a car. I'm dead broke and trying to
pay for my senior year of college, starting in about three
weeks, so buying one is out. Satan hasn't been returning my
calls, so that angle won't work either.

But hey, no car? No problem. Public transit is the
answer. Take a bus/train/vanpool to and from work, it's
that simple, right?

But, well, there aren't any direct public tranportation
solutions between Worcester and Providence, at least not
that I've found in a month of looking (someone,
please prove me wrong...).

So what do I do? I get up in the morning (5:30), walk a
brisk mile to the train station, catch the 6:12 MBTA train
to South Station in Boston, get on a 7:30 Bonanza Bus to
Providence (no MBTA trains go into Providence from Boston
between 7:00 and noon), catch a RIPTA bus to workplace, get
to work about 9:00.

Going home is about the same, except no Bonanza because
there is a 5:55 MBTA from Providence to South Station.
Leave work at 5:30, get home about 9:00.

Whole thing (monthly MBTA zone 9 pass, 2 Bonanza 10-Passes,
Providence RIPTA bus fare) costs me close to $300 a month,
too. Gas would be less, and we've got parking at work so I
wouldn't be paying for that. Gar. Of course, work in
insurance (21, male, no drivers ed) and I'm probably
breaking out ahead as is.

I think it's 45 miles between Worcester and Providence. In
three hours, that's 15 miles an hour. If I was in good
shape, I could bike that. Arg.